| .Monitoring Tony Abbott’s claim of 1 million jobs in 5 years. | |||||||||
| Broken down that is 200,000 jobs a year or 548 Jobs per day to be created | |||||||||
| Source of Data Australian Bureau of Statistics 6202.0 Labour Force Australia | |||||||||
| Source of Abbott Data. | |||||||||
| Year | Month | Full time Jobs created/Lost ABS Data | Part time Jobs created/Lost. ABS Data | Total Jobs created/Lost. ABS Data | Year to Date Jobs created/Lost ABS Data | Target Jobs promised under Abbott policy | Election to date jobs to be created by Abbott policy | Net Jobs Created/Lost. Abbott policy | Total Jobs created/Lost Year to date. ABS + Abbott policy |
|
2013 |
September |
5000 |
4100 |
9100 |
9100 |
12604 |
12604 |
-3,504 |
-3504 |
|
2013 |
October |
-27900 |
28900 |
1000 |
10100 |
16988 |
29592 |
-15,988 |
-19,492 |
|
2013 |
November |
15500 |
5500 |
21000 |
31100 |
16440 |
46032 |
4,560 |
-14,932 |
|
2013 |
December |
-31600 |
9000 |
-22600 |
8500 |
16988 |
63020 |
-39,588 |
-54,520 |
|
2014 2014 |
JanuaryFebruary |
-7100 80500 |
3400 -33300 |
-3700 47200 |
4800 52000 |
16988 15433 |
80008 95441 |
-20,688 31767 |
-75,208 -43441 |
Highlights this month.
The February data from the bureau of Statistics showed an increase of 80,500 new full time jobs and a decrease of 33,000 part time jobs. This gives us a net figure of 47,200 new jobs created. Against his stated aim of creating 1 million jobs in 5 years or 200,000 a year the Abbott government moved from achieving 6% of their aim to achieving 54% of their aim. Which is 43,441 jobs behind
Given the poor figures in previous months, I was astonished at this figure.
Others were astonished and wrote about it in the papers.
Here is Peter Martin, Fairfax economics correspondent.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/buoys-for-the-jobs-as-the-abs-pulls-its-figure-out-20140313-34pm8.html
An extra 80,500 full-time jobs? Don’t believe it for an instant. The Bureau of Statistics doesn’t, and it produced the figure.
The rest of the article is his take on what happened to the figure.
The ABS actually says that there is a sampling error in the data that can range from -9900 to 104500 So the figure of 47,300 can vary by plus 57,200 or minus 57,200.
So astonished that I decided to see how “different” this figure was in the reporting of Labor force Statistics since 1994.
I chose the Trend data and not the seasonally adjusted data as is shown in the table above and looked for changes of greater than 40,000 new jobs created in any month.
(Apologies to readers. There is supposed to be a table of Monthly Job figures here but It is not included because the WordPress facility for adding Word formatted files has gone walkabout. That is also why this post is late.)
The only month where this has happened (over 40,000 new jobs created) was in January 2003.
So the figure of 47,200 new jobs is just extraordinary. Mainly because it uses seasonally adjusted Data and not trend Data.
Whilst I was inputting the figures into the spreadsheet I also noticed that each month was different. For example if January reported a job number of 100 and February said a job number of 110, that meant that 10 jobs had been created. However when I went to the march figures, the February figure might have said 115 and the march figure 120 Which means that 5 new jobs had been created. Because the February figure had changed from 110 to 115 somewhere we had lost 5 jobs.
To compensate for this I then went to the January figures of each year and “locked them in” as the beginning and ending figures for the year.
Then I looked at the difference between the total of each month and the value when you took away December each year from January.
Here is that table.
Increase Decrease in Total Employment Per Month
based on ABS6202.0 Labour Force Statistics. (Trend) Increase Difference
Positive = overestimate Month on month
Negative = underestimate Month on month
December January Total Difference from monthly figures.
Year
1994 7867800 8060500 192700 3800
1995 8077200 8312100 234900 -44800
1996 8325300 8406800 81500 -16700
1997 8419000 8509800 90800 -19600
1998 8526600 8681900 155300 -20500
1999 8690600 8901800 211200 -53100
2000 8914900 9081800 166900 -7000
2001 9072100 9211400 139300 -95300
2002 9225300 9477300 252000 -97300
2003 9517400 9656600 139200 7800
2004 9679700 9824800 145100 33400
2005 9851600 10027000 175400 4900
2006 10027400 10315300 287900 -101300
2007 10327900 10597400 269500 -80400
2008 10616600 10745100 128500 10800
2009 10745400 10909400 164000 -127400
2010 10936200 11421200 485000 -211100
2011 11442800 11446800 4000 56900
2012 11448500 11541600 93100 -27000
2013 11546700 11468400 -78300 142100
(If this Table appears wonky its because The Paste from Word function has disappeared from WordPress).
As you can see from the total column a positive number is an overestimation of the figures month on month. A negative is an underestimation of the jobs created in that year.
So why aren’t the Jobs figures actually representative of the real Jobs being created in the Economy? Its because they are done using a survey and whilst they try and make the survey as accurate as possible, its probably not achievable.
If you want to read about how they do their trend, their Seasonally adjusted stuff and their survey, the ABS explains it in the data they produce each month.
Vince O'Grady 